When You Abandon Objective Truth

Maybe the greatest threat to our economy and way of life is the fact that so many people have agreed to abandon objective truth and embrace feelings and what they want to be real. The consequences of such are severe even if not initially realized. Like the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes, a society can delude itself for a while. But then all of a sudden, objective truth bursts through and everyone realize just how naked the Emperor really was. Only in reality, reality is often vengeful.

Case in point, a year ago incident in Palm Beach, Florida showed that a High School Principal was so caught up in PC culture that he basically denied the Holocaust. He was attempting to be tolerant. But in so doing, he was denying objective truth and whitewashing the worst kind of intolerance.

“Not everyone believes the Holocaust happened,” he wrote, according to email records obtained by The Palm Beach Post through a public records request. “And you have your thoughts, but we are a public school and not all of our parents have the same beliefs.”

He went on to say that as an educator he had “the role to be politically neutral but support all groups in the school.”

“I can’t say the Holocaust is a factual, historical event because I am not in a position to do so as a school district employee,” Latson wrote.

That response led the mother to launch a yearlong effort to address what she called a school leader’s failure to separate truth from myth regarding the genocide of an estimated 6 million Jews under Germany’s Nazi regime in the 1940s.

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” This statement was the “thoughtcrime” of Winston Smith, the protagonist in George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Though not yet a thoughtcrime in the real world, this statement is increasingly suspect.

Politics is the conversation a whole people has about what is good and bad, and just and unjust regarding their common life and common nature as human beings . . .

Language itself, though, is only possible if reason is possible. The law of noncontradiction holds that two plus two can’t be four and not-four at the same time. The whole potential for politics depends on that law, because by it people can use their reason to arrive at and assent to a conclusion, and by it, people can deliberate together and consent to government.

If one denies the law of noncontradiction, however, all that remains is the tyrannical rule of force, one party foisting its will on the rest. A tyrant, after all, doesn’t bother asking for the opinion of his slaves.

Increasingly, progressives are using perplexing language that subtly denies the law of noncontradiction and hence reason, language, and politics. These progressives imagine that they are merely resorting to unconventional terms in order to avoid acquiescing to modes of thinking they believe support unjust power structures.

What they are really doing, however, is collapsing the only possible means of condemning injustice that isn’t itself a form of injustice. Tyranny can’t be made legitimate by making the tyrant and slave switch positions . . .

In Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” there is a disturbing resemblance between this rhetoric and that of the novel’s antagonist, O’Brien. “Two and two are four,” insisted Winston. “Sometimes, Winston,” corrected O’Brien. “Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once.”

You can claim that two plus two equals whatever your truth or lived experience says it is, but if that is granted, only tyranny follows.

On the other hand, those who deny the objective and make feelings-based observations are often applauded. Witness the boldness of former Cabinet Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Julian Castro on the campaign trail for President. He proudly stated that biological males who are trans-females have the right to have an abortion. He said it is only “reproductive justice.” Never mind the fact that they can’t get pregnant. He wants them to have access to taxpayer-funded abortions:

When the man arrived at the hospital with severe abdominal pains, a nurse didn’t consider it an emergency, noting that he was obese and had stopped taking blood pressure medicines. In reality, he was pregnant — a transgender man in labor that was about to end in a stillbirth.

The tragic case, described in Wednesday’s New England Journal of Medicine, points to larger issues about assigning labels or making assumptions in a society increasingly confronting gender variations in sports, entertainment and government. In medicine, there’s a similar danger of missing diseases such as sickle cell and cystic fibrosis that largely affect specific racial groups, the authors write.

“The point is not what’s happened to this particular individual but this is an example of what happens to transgender people interacting with the health care system,” said the lead author, Dr. Daphna Stroumsa of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

“He was rightly classified as a man” in the medical records and appears masculine, Stroumsa said. “But that classification threw us off from considering his actual medical needs.”

The bottom line is this. When we deny objective truth in favor of feelings, we enter an Orwellian world that will lead to tyranny and great harm. Can you imagine if we allowed people to believe that 2+2 might equal 5? Would you want to drive over a bridge built following that delusion? Or get on an airplane built by a feelings-based engineer?

It’s important to note that this is not the same concern as raised by Russian propaganda to hinder American technological progress. It is objective information about cell towers and the radiation they emit from a PhD in physics who was a true pioneer in the mobile phone industry. We know the Russians used propaganda to attack our domestic energy industry. Now, they are using it to try and stop us from reasonable 5G development. But just because we can objectively say the Russians are wrong about 5G does not mean we can ignore the truth about the potential dangers of 5G base stations. Truth is truth (even if it seems inconvenient). And our policy must be based on truth to be effective.

I call all this out because objective truth is essential for a successful society. It’s ok to have feelings. But there are certain decisions that cannot be made based upon feelings alone. The world is what it is, not what we wish it to be.

Our challenge is to push back on the extreme political correctness that is spreading like a cancer through society. We must not deny the Holocaust or water-down its horror from our memory. We should not let feelings override objective truth. If we do, we will be at the mercy of our adversaries. The challenges we face globally don’t care about our “feelings.”